Work Work.

Gold making can seem like work at the time, and I admit that it seems doubly so when you are not just making gold on the auction house but writing about it, implementing new designs about it, dealing with spam, replying to emails and messages about it, forums, and networking. Well it’s all Work Work, Zug Zug, and sometimes you just have to take a break!

That is my message for you today: Take a break. When our brains are busy busy busy all the time, they do not have time to enter daydream state. Our peon has the right idea by taking a break from his work to let his body and mind relax and prepare for his work.

Listening to the Just My Two Copper teamspeak meeting broadcast, I was shocked by the number of gold experts who are spending hours and hours making gold online on World of Warcraft. One guru went so far as to say they did not remember the last time when they had left the capital city.

To be honest, I would hate that to happen to me. I enjoy making gold in World of Warcraft. But I’m horrified by the idea of it taking over my life. Even thinking about this from a professional point of view, how can you expect to stay on top of the trends, upcoming changes, finding what players want to buy, finding which items are commonly being sold, how can you expect to understand players and your entire virtual economy if you aren’t even moving away from the Auction House.

My challenge to you for today is: move away from the auction house. Give up making gold for a few hours. Go and enjoy yourself. Day dream. Join in with some raids, some pugs, or pvp. Re-connect with your buyers at the base level. Even go and do some farming for once, try and remember what it was like to grind for mats. You may have a little more consideration for your ‘farmers’ and players who are out gathering for you whilst you rake in the gold stood around in Stormwind or Orgrimmar.

Take a break.

Talking point: What percentage of your time do you give to making gold? Â Would you like to spend more time or less time doing this? Â When does the fun of the Auction House turn from a challenge into a second job? Or do you disagree and think there is no benefit to taking a break?

About the Author

The Gold Queen is written by Alyzande. With many level 100s, 9 years expertise in making gold, 10 garrisons, 16k achievements, 1505 days played, and over 18m gold earned. The Gold Queen blog teaches you how to make gold playing World of Warcraft using ethical trading, auction house flipping, crafting, reselling snatch lists, and farming gold making.

Thank you for all your comments, it’s good to connect with you and hear your opinions about taking a break from making wow gold to play the game and relax and enjoy it.

I’ve been working on slowly leveling an alt (warlock) when I get some spare time, and that’s been enjoyable, relearning her spells and abilities. I have to admit, her demon imp has taken quite a beating the last 24 hours!

Often times, I only get maybe 15 minutes into my auction house routine before I am recruited for a guild dungeon run. In the end, I may get an hour a day to try to keep up with the auction house sales. Because of this, my rate of gold income is limited, though I am slowly approaching the 100k mark.

Personally I probably spend about 2 hours gold making a day and another 4 hours weekly restocking everything. Generally while I am posting/cancelling/buying I am reading the gold blogs out there so this time could be reduced if I was actually paying attention to my Warcraft window the whole time. Doing nothing but focusing on making gold is a bit much in my opinion. Warcraft is a game and it should be fun.

I’ve been helping guildies, chasing a few guild achieves, rep achieves for myself & generally running dungeons of all levels for the past few weeks. Gold making is an important part of the game for me but I couldn’t do it 100% of the time in game. Some days, yes, I do spend most of my time on it, one way or another but that’s because I’m in the mood for it, that day. Other days, I just about empty my mail & repost.

I’ve loved chasing mounts these last few weeks. I agree with you that having a fun side-project away from gold-making is one of the best things a gold-maker can do to keep their enjoyment of the game high.

WoW is a huge game and here are many ways to play it. Be sure to chase your fun.